Dragon Hunt
by Bill Hiers
Summary: Commander Hamada of the ACU has the vital task of defending human lives against escaping dinosaurs at Jurassic World. But the former Tokyo policeman may have finally met his match with Indominus rex. Another story told from a minor character's P.O.V.
1. A Not So Typical Morning

Katashi Hamada sipped his Starbucks coffee as he exited his apartment. He was dressed casually, in a Hawaiian shirt and loosefitting slacks. A casual observer would not know that the tall Asian man was the commanding offcer of Jurassic World's Asset Containment Unit, but he was, making him essentially the most important member of Masrani's security detail on the island.

He walked down the pebbled walkway towards the gated entrance of the employee living quarters, where a Mercedes SUV sat idling. A shining chrome testament to the park's sleek design aesthetic, the vehicle was one of twenty used by Jurassic World employees for various purposes. This one was numbered 16. On both front doors it bore the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton emblem of the park as well as the stencilled legend "For Official Use Only."

A female ACU trooper, Meyers, was behind the wheel. She smiled as her commander approached and opened the door. Hamada didn't smile back. He rarely smiled. In fact, back home in his native Japan, there was a joke among his friends and family that he'd only ever smiled twice: once when he'd married his wife Kyo, and a second time when his daughter Tanya had been born. Raised by very stern parents in a joyless household full of repressed emotions, he didn't wear his emotions on his sleeve. So in response to Meyers' smile, he simply nodded curtly. A man of rigid habits, he was powerless to change his ways, though, and, as he approached forty, he'd given up trying. It wasn't important, anyway. Those who knew him well, like his subordinates, knew not to judge a book by its cover, that the unsmiling ACU commander was in fact a caring and warm-hearted man. Everyone else, well, Hamada honestly didn't give a damn what they thought. Let them consider him a humorless dullard if they wanted. That was their problem.

"How's Kyo?" Meyers asked as she put the Mercedes into gear and started off.

"Oh, she's fine," Hamada replied. "The usual gripes."

He'd spoken to his wife on the phone earlier that morning. Tanya was having some trouble at school and Kyo used the opportunity to make her usual complaint about how her husband had quit the Tokyo police force to go to some forsaken muggy island off the coast of Costa Rica to be a glorified zookeeper.

Hamada turned and looked at his reflection in the rolled up passenger window. Fast approaching middle age, the smooth-faced Japanese man had short, salt and pepper hair shaved in a military style crewcut. He was wearing his usual expression which some said made him look perpetually suspicious, but which he thought made him look just bored, with his eyes set above a somewhat flat, broad nose, his mouth a straight line, unreadable, his jaw wide and strong. Although he was of medium height, he had very broad shoulders and underneath his loosefitting shirt and pants was a body kept taut and muscled through a daily workout routine every evening.

As they drove towards ACU headquarters, Hamada reflected, as he often did, on Kyo's complaint. He didn't see himself as a zookeeper. That was the animal handler's job. In many ways, he considered himself a janitor. But one of situations as opposed to physical messes.

They weren't as visible as the rangers. The rangers dealt directly with guest safety, while Asset Containment was only called into action in the event of a Code 19. An escape. They existed solely to clean up other people's messes. And to protect people, he reminded himself, sitting up a little straighter in his seat. He'd entered the police force in Tokyo out of a desire to serve his community and do some good, and by the time he'd been headhunted by Masrani Global to lead Asset Containment, he was serving as a captain with a SWAT unit with several commendations and not one reprimand or complaint against him.

He'd heard of Jurassic World, of course. Everyone had. And like everyone else he'd been aware of the incident in San Diego. And the escaped Pteranodons from Isla Sorna. The man from Masrani Global had sold him on the idea of working at the park by telling him he'd be in charge of safety and protecting the guests; that with such potentially dangerous animals, Masrani needed someone with Hamada's spotless record to lead his special team whose sole job was to recapture, or kill, escaped dinosaurs. Thinking of the people who'd died in the San Diego incident, Hamada had been convinced. Kyo, not so much. She still hadn't accepted his choice even after all this time.

Meyers turned offroad. The Mercedes bounced along the unpaved dirt road leading towards the ACU building, which was located a good ways from the main area of the park because of Simon Masrani's idea that guests didn't need to see the armored vehicles and guns they used.

The cell phone clipped to his belt vibrated. Transferring his coffee to the cup holder, he answered it. A text message. The escaped male Pachycephalosaurus had been successfully recaptured. Good, he thought. He'd need to talk to Claire about that. The implants which were supposed to shock the dinosaurs if they got close to the invisible fences were just plain no good in his opinion. A very old-fashioned man when it came to security, he'd been trying unsuccessfully to convince Claire to start installing actual, physical fences. Sometimes, low-tech was best. But she had been ignoring him, apparently because she and the park's investors were enamored with the sleek, iPod-style technology and did not want to part with it. Some of the most vocal supporters, Hamada noted with some personal shame, were countrymen of his; investors from a Japanese firm who'd actually been among the money men in the 1990s who'd invested in Hammond's original park.

Hamada didn't understand why they were so technology-obsessed. Their argument was apparently that the physical fences in Jurassic Park had failed, therefore they needed something else. Hamada had wanted to tell them that Jurassic Park's security system hadn't been fundamentally flawed; it'd been deliberately sabotaged. But he knew this would fall on deaf ears, and, not a confrontational man, he'd chosen to keep his mouth shut. Usually. There were a few paddocks where he had insisted on physical barriers. The T-Rex Kingdom was one. Heaven help everyone on the island if its lone occupant ever escaped. Nobody had argued against utilizing a physical enclosure with a reinforced gate there. Nor at the amusingly-named Raptor Research Arena.

And then, of course, there was Paddock 11. "The cage," they called it. Of course, cage was slang for most of the paddocks, but when Jurassic World employees used it in reference to Paddock 11, it was in an ominous way that made Hamada mildly uncomfortable. The dinosaur, the thing, they kept there, made him even more uncomfortable. He'd seen it only once, and that'd been enough. After that, he'd insisted, politely but firmly, that Claire had the walls of the fortress-like enclosure, already thirty feet high, built up taller. He was also considering asking for a secondary wall, but it'd been an uphill battle just to get the walls' height increased to forty feet, so he wasn't going to press his luck. Yet.

Hamada noted that the pro-invisible fence crowd went old school for the enclosures holding the big carnivores. But it was Hamada's opinion, based on consultants and experts he'd spoken with, including a former big game hunter turned safari leader from Kenya named Roland Tembo, that the herbivores could be just as dangerous as the meat-eaters, especially when provoked. Based on some of the stories Tembo had told him, Hamada was, to this day, amazed nobody had been trampled to death by a scared or enraged Triceratops.

And after this latest incident with the Pachy, he was determined to take his case to Claire and offer her a choice: either she installed the added security measures he wanted, or he walked. It wasn't the most honorable way to get what he wanted, but a man couldn't build without tools, and a security team leader couldn't effectively do his job without the proper security measures. As simple as that.

He was about to lower his phone when it beeped again. Another text message.

"Shit," he said, simply, as he saw what had been sent to him.

"What is it?" asked Meyers without taking her eyes off the road.

"Code 19," he replied evenly. "Two people dead. The supervisor and some worker."

Meyers glanced briefly at him, then returned her eyes to the road. She frowned. "Which paddock?" she asked as they approached the ACU building up ahead.

"Eleven," he finally said.

Meyers said nothing.

A short time later, they were inside ACU headquarters, where Hamada had changed into his ACU uniform, consisting of dark bluish gray fatigues, a matching baseball cap, combat boots and kevlar chest armor. He'd done this immediately upon arriving. Although nor order had come down for them to move out, he knew the order was coming, and soon.

Sitting in his modestly furnished office, he reviewed the situation on his desktop. Apparently, during a check of Paddock 11's structural integrity by retired Navy officer Owen Grady, the genetically engineered hybrid dinosaur, Indominus rex, had disappeared from the paddock's thermal imaging scans. Hamada wasn't clear on what happened next but it seemed to him that Grady and the paddock supervisor feared Indominus had escaped and had entered the enclosure to determine how, only for it to turn out she was still inside after all. Somehow, she'd fooled the thermal scanners. So much for technology, Hamada thought.

In the ensuing attack, something prevented the men from exiting through the employee door, forcing the supervisor to open the maintenance door... through which I-rex had naturally gotten out. There'd been two casualties. The supervisor himself and one of the paddock workers. Clicking with his mouse, Hamada looked at the hastily compiled incident report. Listed dead were "Dr. Nick Edelstein - Paddock 11 Supervisor" and "Ellis Fernandez - Paddock 11 Staff." Edelstein was an engineer from America, whilst Fernandez was a workman, one of several locally-hired Costa Ricans.

Hamada looked at their employee ID photos. Both men were smiling, cheerful. Hamada imagined they had no such expressions at the time they'd met their end only a few minutes ago. He sighed and clicked a button. "Deceased" covered both men's pictures in bold red letters with horrifying finality. He wondered, as he often did when these sorts of things happened, if they had families. Hamada felt angry. The higher-ups would probably say something like "only two people." But to Hamada, two people was two people too many.

He shut off his computer after saving the report, and rose, marching firmly into the situation room where a group of troopers stood dressed identically to him. They were awaiting his orders. He stepped up to a big screen on the wall, where he was joined by his sub-commander, Austin.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said after a moment, "as you're no doubt aware, we have a Code 19. And it's the big one. Paddock 11."

There were murmurs from among the troopers. A few shifted uneasily on their feet.

"Since we're probably going to be called out to deal with this thing, we ought to review what happened..."

He filled them in. Owen Grady. The duping of thermal imaging. The foolish decision to enter the paddock. He showed the security footage. Grady, Edelstein and Fernandez were standing at the wall by the big maintenance door. Suddenly, something compelled them to turn as one and flee to the left, out of camera range. Edelstein lagged, a slow last, and it seemed to take him forever to cross the screen and disappear out of view. Seconds later he reappeared, rushing as quickly as he was able to the keypad by the door. Everyone watched with bated breath as he entered his code, causing the door to open. He turned, paused, reacted to something, and then ran through the slowly opening door. Suddenly it began to close again. Hamada knew this was because someone in central control had remotely closed it. Then Owen Grady came running back in from the left, and everyone saw the Indominus rex for the first time, hot on his heels. Someone gasped. There was no sign of Fernandez.

Grady successfully made it through.

And so did Indominus, knocking the door off of its track.

The footage continued playing showing just the open door and paddock interior. Hamada stopped it. Idiots, he thought. He blamed Grady for unintentionally leading Indominus through the door, and Edelstein for opening it. But there'd be time for assigning blame later. Soon enough, he and his men would be sent out to, he hoped, kill the dinosaur.

"We're going up against that thing?" a young trooper named Phelps said uneasily.

Hamada nodded.

"That's crazy!"

"It's what they pay us to do," Austin said firmly.

Hamada stepped forward "My friends, let me remind you that as intimidating as the good Dr. Wu's pet may be, she is still mortal. She can still be killed. And we will kill her. Because we must. There are thousands of people on this island, Indominus rex has already killed two of them. We're all that stands between her and anyone else." His expression hardened slightly, but only slightly. "And I am telling you... she will not kill anyone else. Not as long as I am in command."

The phone rang. Hamada went and answered it. It was indeed the order he'd been waiting for... but with a twist. He felt his heart sink as Claire Dearing told him the last thing he wanted to hear. He gave a curt "Yes, ma'am," told her she could count on him, and hung up. Damn it, he thought. If he lived through this, he was going to see to it things changed around here and those fools in central control finally started listening to him. He turned and addressed his subordinates. Austin in particular was eying him worriedly.

"Break out the net launchers and the taser rifles..." Hamada said finally.

Everyone gasped. They knew what this meant. Non-lethals. They were being ordered to recapture that living nightmare alive. As everyone went to retrieve their weapons, Hamada found himself grabbed by the arm by Austin.

"Tell me you're not serious," he said.

Hamada looked at his arm. After a moment, Austin released him. "I am," he said. "But I'm not going out there without some assurance." He turned and addressed a tall trooper named Miller, one of his best marksmen. "You," he said, "bring a shotgun."

Miller nodded and went off. The orders were to recapture Indominus alive. But Hamada had not been forbidden from employing lethal firearms for self-defense. And so he was arming at least one man with something that could kill I-rex if it came down to it. And something told him, he thought as he retrieved a taser rifle and cattle prod from his personal weapons locker, that it would indeed come to that. 


	2. Fight or Flight

Hamada sat in the front passenger seat of the truck, hurtling down the service road at an even thirty. Although it was rough going, the comfortable interior kept the passengers from feeling the road much. The truck was a six-wheeled monster, one of three gifted to Jurassic World by Mercedes the previous year, as part of the German auto manufacturer's sponsorship of the park, and had been customized to Hamada's exact specifications.

In the side view mirror, he glimpsed the armored van trundling along behind them, another Mercedes, also customized to fit the former police captain's expectations. Behind it was a second, identical van. In all, three vehicles made up the little convoy. Meyers was driving the vehicle in which Hamada rode. He trusted no one else to chauffeur him into danger. In the backseat, Craig and Lee sat, looking nervous. Hamada couldn't see their faces, of course, but he knew how they looked. Nervous. Terrified. And so was he. Of course, his blank expression didn't show it. As the commander, he had to lead by example.

But deep down in his bones, Hamada was utterly terrified. Indominus rex was not going to be an ordinary takedown. What in the world were Masrani and Dearing thinking? He shut his eyes and ran his gloved hand over his face and realized he was sweating. Was his nervousness really showing that much? He hoped not.

"Hey, look," he heard Craig say.

This made Hamada glance up. Look? At what? It was the first time any of them had spoken since they'd set out.

"Jesus..." said Meyers.

"What?" asked Hamada.

Through the trees on the lefthand side of the truck, they could see the river. He saw Stegosaurs and Apatosaurs drinking. So? he wondered. What was so- Then he saw them. The kayaking tourists. The motherfucking Cretaceous Cruise. Damn Claire Dearing. Damn her. He frowned as he looked at the computer mounted on his wrist, its tiny screen showing the blinking dot representing Indominus, relevant to the wearer's location. They were coming up on her location. Another minute. Maybe less. Damn her, he thought again. Those people were floating ignorantly downstream, blissfully unaware of the fifty feet of rampaging nightmare beast which at any moment decide to come tearing through the trees, attracted to the sounds of splashing, yelling and laughter. The more Hamada pictured in his mind the horrifying image of innocent children being ground into bloodied meat by ravening jaws, the angrier he became.

He pressed a button on the dashboard console, ensuring that what he said next would be heard only on the ACU band, and not by anyone listening in the control room. He also made sure to speak in his native tongue, which he knew only a handful of people, including his team leaders, spoke. For security purposes, it'd been an idea he'd come up with when he first took the job.

"Vehicle #3," he said evenly in Japanese, "halt up here, disperse. I want those people to turn back."

"What?" came the voice of Jefferson, the third team's commanding officer. He spoke stilted but passable Japanese "Katashi-"

"Do as I say, damn you," Hamada hissed, uncharacteristically allowing some of his anger to show. He hoped that Jefferson got the message.

"I understand," came the voice through his earpiece. "What do I tell them?"

A good question. "Just make something up. Anything to make them go back."

"Okay," said Jefferson.

He looked in the side view mirror. The third vehicle in the line slowed down and was soon lost in the distance as the vehicles in front of it sped away and left it behind. Hamada tuned back to the band the control room could listen in on. If Claire wanted to tear into him later, Hamada would endure it. But he wanted those kayaking visitors out of harm's way.

In case...

"Up here," Hamada said to Meyers.

In case we fail.

The Mercedes turned offroad, drove about four feet, and slid to a noisy halt. Meyers cut the engine and they got out. Behind him, the remaining armored van drove up and stopped. Team commander Austin and his subordinates Cooper, Miller and Spears got out. The eight of them then turned and started through the waist-high brush, weapons up. Hamada consulted his wrist computer. Seven feet. Five feet. Something was wrong. Indominus was big. And noisy. And destructive. Anything that big and pissed off would be visible, or at least audible, at this distance. Where the hell was she?

The plants abruptly ended at the bank of a shallow stream filled with moss-covered rocks and logs jutting out of the water. Hamda carefully waded into the ankle-deep water while the other seven waited on the bank. Gradually, audible over the gentle gurgling of the water and the splashes of his booted feet, Hamada became aware of a beeping noise. Suddenly, directly ahead, he saw it. A chunk of grayish, pebbly-looking skin lying against a blood-splattered rock.

Damn it, he thought as he approached it. Something told him he didn't need his computer anymore. And he was right. The beeping was definitely coming from the chunk of flesh. He held up a hand, closed into a fist, wordlessly indicating that his team wait by the water and not venture in after him. He squatted, laying his taser rifle across his knees, and picked the gore-encrusted tracking device up off of the rock. Perfect, he thought. Indominus had clawed the thing out.

"The blood's not clotted yet," he said for the benefit of those observing via the body cam he wore back in the control room. "It's close."

Digging around in the meat, he found the tracking device's shutoff switch and flicked it. The annoying beeping sound ceased. This was perfect. Not only was Indominus dangerous, she was highly intelligent, too. And without the tracking device implanted in her, the ACU had no ready means of tracking her with anything except their eyes. She could go anywhere she wanted now. Hamada was doubly thankful he'd sent Jefferson to turn those boating tourists back.

He was just starting to try and formulate a plan of action, trying to decide what to do next, when he felt something wet hit his bare forearm where the sleeve of his uniform had pulled back a bit, exposing his skin. Bloop. Probably just water. Dew dripping from-

He looked.

It was red.

Blood? How-

Bloop. Another drop. Larger than the first. He watched the reddish liquid dribble off his arm and into the water. He frowned and glanced up. A third and fourth droplet slid off of some leaves about six feet above him. He wasn't worried. His first thought was that the blood had been shed and landed there when Indominus first tore the tracking device out. Sure, that made sense. Nothing to worry about, he thought as he slowly rose to his feet and looked back at his waiting team. The blood had just been dislodged when a gust of wind blew through and-

Crack. Snap. Movement nearby, off to Hamada's right.

It occurred to him, even as he noticed Meyers and the others looking up and over that way, that there was no wind. It'd been windy earlier, but since they'd set out, the weather had settled in, and it'd been a hot, humid, deathly still afternoon. No wind, Hamada repeated to himself as he looked right to see what had suddenly grabbed his subordinates' attention. The leaves of a nearby tree were moving, as though being blown in a nonexistent wind. No, not blowing. Shimmering, almost. It was bizarre.

And then, appearing as if by magic, out of shimmering, undulating desert mirage, Indominus rex appeared. And it took Hamada, rather shamefully, he realized, quite a few seconds longer than he would've liked to admit what he was seeing.

"It can camouflage!" he cried out.

When humans are confronted with danger, they enter into fight or flight mode. Some choose to stand and fight, others choose to flee. Hamada would've liked to have someone tell Kyo and Tanya that he had stood and fought, but he was only human. And who could blame him? One look at those teeth, and Hamada knew what it was like to be one of mankind's primitive ancestors, facing a fierce predator like a sabertoothed tiger with naught but spears and clubs for defense. All thought of using his taser rifle left his mind, even as his team on the shore opened up with their own weapons, bombarding the enormous reptilian form behind him with puny stun blasts which didn't seem to do anything.

Clutching the (useless) weapon, Hamada surged through the ankle-deep water towards the shore, and in his mind he saw himself making it, ignored the tightening grip he felt around his waist, pinning his arms to his sides, saw himself rejoining his team and escaping, choosing to pay no heed to the fact he was lifted up, up, up into the air, legs kicking, as if he were no more than a doll, saw himself making it back and returning with nothing less than a Goddamn bazooka or a flamethrower to wipe Wu's genetically-engineered horror off the face of the Earth, to hell with what Masrani and Dearing said, ignored the sound of his own pitiful, high-pitched screaming as he struggled uselessly in Indominus' hand.

Suddenly he was dropped. As he fell, the water rushing up to greet him, Hamada realized that, of course, he'd done none of those things. He'd gone perhaps less than two feet before the dinosaur had grabbed him. The mind plays cruel tricks on people, he realized as he splashed into the water. He flailed around beneath the surface for a moment, in a blind panic, throwing his rifle away, feeling his hat fly off and go sailing he knew not where, before remembering it was only about a foot deep or so. It would've been funny if he weren't so close to pissing himself. Pushing himself up, he took a grateful breath of air before a great weight pressed against his back, forcing him under again. He inhaled on reflex, his lungs filling with water, and the only reason he didn't drown was because the several tons' worth of weight Indominus put on her foot crushed him into such a mangled pulp that the world blacked out for him as quickly as if someone had flicked a light switch. 


End file.
